First day of school/last time at Peruvian preschool for Sophia!

USA school year: August-June
Peruvian school year: March-December

The boys started their second semester in February and Sophia started at her Peruvian preschool in March.  The difference is that the boys are still in the same school year, whereas Sophia started up a whole new year.  The weird thing is that she will only be in preschool until August when she will start Kindergarten at ICSL, the school where the boys attend.  So between August 2013 and August 2014 the kids will have 3 first days of school. :)  Awesome!

Arequipa, Peru

Who doesn't love a good road trip story!?  We left at 3am on a Saturday morning to drive to Arequipa, a city in southern Peru and the city where the two youngest boys were born.  About 5 hours into our trip, the car starts acting funny and refusing to shift gears.  Not a great thing when our total trip is about 13 hours and we are less than half way there.  We pull off in Nazca to look for some transmission fluid, but it's just before 8am so finding something that's open was a challenge...thankfully we located one little hole in the wall and the guy poured it in.  It took and we were off again.

Our entire trip was about 1,000 kilometers....at the 999th kilometer, our car overheated and refused to budge.  An entire day of coastal beauty, desert hills, passing large trucks and buses and then smoke started pouring out the engine.  We were so thankful that our friends lived right around the corner and we had made our entire trip without breaking down until the very end!!  Such a blessing!!

The car entered the shop, was able to be fixed (a hose had a hole burned in it), and two weeks later we were on our way back home.  The boys enjoyed a week of summer camp, playing with friends, and even some rain!! While Jeff enjoyed teaching a week long class at the Bible institute and I actually relaxed more than I had in years--I managed to finish reading 4 whole books!!!  Good times.

This guy is amazing with his mad Peruvian driving skills!

Squatted land.

There's not really an adequate caption for this...oh my goodness!!!

So much traffic to pass--super slow trucks.

Beautiful volcano Misti, overlooking AQP

Workers planting in the field.

Flying through the holidays and into 2014

We managed to soar through Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years without even pausing to take a breath.  The kids finished their semester just before Christmas and Jeff finished his school year the beginning of December...it was, without a doubt, the busiest 4 months we've had in years.  Between heading home on Home Assignment for 6 weeks of full-on "busy" and then coming back to Peru only to start school the day after our arrival, we hit the ground running.  Jeff taught 2 classes and I volunteered for various school functions, including co-planning the biggest fundraiser that the school hosts each year.  Now that we are well into 2014, well, at least 2 weeks into the new year, we've decided to slow down a bit. We'll see how well we do with that goal...

The ice cream lady waits outside for school to get out and then sells anything from popsicles to ice cream sandwiches.

I enjoyed being part of a Christmas Bazaar, selling some handmade ornaments, Christmas tags, and other crafts.

Packages wrapped in brown paper...I love this!

Sophia participated in a Christmas/end of the school year program--as a little Flamenco dancer! 

New Year's Eve...fireworks light up the entire city for at least 20 minutes straight!

We started a new New Year's Eve tradition...grilling pizzas on the balcony and then eating s'mores!